The Critic (21 page)

Sophie gazed up at her father with concern. ‘Do you?’

Enzo shrugged dismissively. ‘It could take weeks to get the paperwork sorted out for something like this. We don’t have the time.’

‘So how are you going to get them through customs?’ Bertrand said.

‘I’ll pack them into the lining of my suitcase. They’re not going to show up on the x-ray.’

But Michelle was shaking her head. ‘You know, these days the TSA are going through almost every bag. They find these things in your suitcase, not only will you lose them, you’ll be in deep shit.’

‘What’ll you do, Papa?’ For the moment, Sophie had forgotten her feud with Michelle.

‘I’ll think of something,’ Enzo said, as if thinking of something might be the easiest thing in the world. While, in truth, he hadn’t the least idea of what it was he would do. He turned instead towards his whiteboard and the coded review he had scrawled across it the day before. ‘Right now, we need to concentrate on breaking Gil Petty’s code.’

IV.

The rain had not yet reached Lascombes, but as she drove up the winding track towards the farm, Nicole could see the clouds gathering on the distant horizon. The wind breathed through the hills in gasps and sighs, gathering in eddies where mountain streams cut through rock as old as time, shaking leaves from trees and lifting them up to carry them off on its wayward path.

Everything seemed so normal. The tractor stood in the yard, a chainsaw lying beside the wooden trestle where her father cut the logs. The dogs came running to greet her as they always did, oblivious to the death in their midst, recognising the pitch of the old Renault 4L that her father had bought for her at the car market. As she got out of it, the wind whipped about her face, and the dogs danced, barking, about her legs. She barely noticed them. She looked towards the stoop, where they had sat so often on warm summer evenings, her mother reading to her from the books she borrowed each week from the library van that came to the road’s end. And as the door of the house opened, she found it hard to believe that it would not be her mother who stepped out to greet her. Harder still to accept that it never would.

Her father stood in the doorway looking at her. Still with his old flat cap pushed back on his head, dungarees torn and stained from his labours on the farm, big boots caked with mud and shit. He looked miserable, desolate. Diminished somehow.

Tears sprang to her eyes again, and she ran across the yard and up the steps to throw herself into his arms. They stood for a long time holding each other, holding onto every memory they’d ever had of the woman they both loved, in case they might slip away just as she had. When, finally, she looked up into his face, she saw no tears in his eyes. Men like her father did not cry. They just bled inside and suffered in silence.

The
séjour
was dark, the remnants of oak logs smouldering in the
cheminée
, the smell of stale cooking hanging in still air. Her aunt took her in her arms and kissed her. She, too, was dry-eyed, but Nicole could see in them that there had been tears. There was a limit to how much crying you could do.

It was with an awful sense of dread that Nicole pushed open the door to her mother’s bedroom to see her laid out on the bed, candles burning on bedside tables at either side of her pillow. Their flames threw flickering shadows on the bloodless skin of her mother’s face, the only warmth in the blue-white chill of death. But the lines etched around her eyes and mouth by months of pain had gone. She looked at peace now, a strange serenity about her.

The air was filled with the scent of burning wax and something medicinal, like disinfectant in a hospital. Her mother’s hands were folded together in her lap. Nicole approached the bed to take one of them in hers. She was shocked by how cold it was. Shocked, too, by how little like her mother this dead person was: all animation and personality removed, life and laughter long departed. Leaving only the vessel that had borne them. Not really her mother at all.

She closed her eyes and thought again about kneeling in the abbey the previous night, praying for a quick and painless departure. She could not help wondering, irrationally, as she had through all the long drive from Gaillac, if she was somehow responsible for her mother’s death.

***

They walked in silence together up to the old abandoned farmhouse, past the piles of logs heaped up along the track, canvas covers whipping and billowing in the wind. Cloud had obliterated the sun. They could see the rain now, sweeping across the distant hills like a fog. Lightning flashed across the horizon, and they heard the far-off rumble of thunder. They stopped to watch for a moment, knowing that it was only a matter of minutes before the rain would reach them.

Her father scratched his head with fingers that were black from harvesting walnuts. ‘Can’t do it on my own,’ he said.

Nicole turned her face up to look at him, puzzled.

‘Do what, Papa?’

‘Run the farm. With Marie gone…I can’t do it on my own.’

Nicole sighed. Her mother had done so much on the farm, as well as keeping house, cooking for them, doing the laundries. Her father was right. There was no way he could do it all himself. ‘Can’t you get help?’

He shook his head and avoided her eye. ‘Can’t afford it.’ He was silent for a long time. Perhaps it was only the first spots of rain blowing in their faces that precipitated his final confession. ‘See, it was always a struggle, Nicole. Putting you through university. Paying your digs in Toulouse.’ He turned big, sad, guilty eyes to meet his daughter’s. ‘Can’t do it and pay someone to help. You’ll need to come home. Take your mother’s place.’

Chapter Sixteen

I.

‘Cryptography,’ Enzo said. ‘From the Greek.
Kryptós
, meaning hidden, and
gráfo
, meaning to write. Once described by the cryptographer Ron Rivest as being all about communication in the presence of adversaries.’

He set himself tipping back and forth in the rocking chair, all the while gazing thoughtfully at his whiteboard. In his hand he clutched the tasting notes of old Jacques Domenech. He was looking for a starting point.

Michelle sat on the stairs, a half-drunk glass of red wine on the step beside her. She pulled her knees up under her chin, arms hugging her shins, and stared at the code her father had created. She had no idea where to even begin to try to break it. Sophie had taken Nicole’s place at the computer. Bertrand stood behind her, a glass of wine in his hand, pointing and prompting as she pulled up different sites on the internet.

‘Wikipedia,’ he said, and she tapped some more.

‘Okay.’ She read aloud. ‘One of cryptography’s primary purposes is hiding the meaning of messages. Not usually the existence of such messages.’ She puffed up her cheeks and blew through her lips. ‘Talk about stating the obvious.’

‘No, no.’ Enzo interrupted her. ‘The obvious is what we so often miss. So it does no harm to state it.’

Sophie’s fingers rattled over the keyboard, annoyed at being put down by her father in front of Michelle. ‘Here’s a book called
Between Silk and Cyanide
,’ she said. ‘About code-breaking during the Second World War.’

‘I’ve read it,’ Enzo said. ‘Agents used poems they’d written themselves as the basis for their codes.’ He grinned. ‘There was no way the Germans could possibly guess the next line in a piece of doggerel which began, “Is de Gaulle’s prick twelve inches thick?”’

‘Papa, that’s disgusting!’

‘That was the point. The more crude or absurd, the more impossible for someone else to crack it.’

‘It doesn’t sound like my father,’ Michelle said.

Enzo nodded his agreement. Petty, it seemed, had been a pretty humourless individual. ‘But in any case, he wouldn’t have needed to make his code that difficult. He was guarding against accidental discovery. I don’t think he ever imagined that anyone would be making a concerted effort to break it. I guess it was almost like a kind of shorthand. More for himself than anything else.’

‘Did your father speak another language?’ Bertrand glanced towards Michelle.

‘French. Some Spanish. I don’t think he was particularly fluent in either.’

Sophie looked up at the board. ‘oh, nm, ky, ks is not French. It’s not like any kind of Spanish I’ve ever seen either.’

‘No, but it’s a good thought,’ Enzo said. ‘What’s another language, except another set of words for the same thing? A French-English dictionary, for example, is just two lists of corresponding words, one of which is alphabetical.’

‘I see what you mean.’ Michelle lifted her glass and sipped pensively. ‘So you think my dad just made a list of the terms he uses to describe wines, and set them against another list of some kind.’

‘A poem, maybe?’ Sophie chipped in. ‘The first and last letters of each word.’

‘I doubt it.’ Enzo shook his head. ‘Too complicated. It would have to be something he could remember quite easily, without reference to something written.’ He caught Sophie glaring at him and felt a stab of guilt at having dismissed her so easily. ‘But it’s a good thought.’

The damage, however, had been done. Sophie confined her frustration to a single, audible tut. She turned back to the computer and the chatter of the keyboard reflected her annoyance as she typed another search into Google. Her eyebrows shot up in sudden surprise and she looked at Michelle. ‘Did you know your dad’s website’s still up on the net?’

Michelle shrugged. ‘There wouldn’t have been anyone to remove it. I guess there are probably thousands of websites out there belonging to dead people.’

Bertrand stabbed a finger at the screen. ‘There. What’s that?’

Sophie peered at the screen. ‘It’s a link to something called a taste wheel. What the hell’s a taste wheel?’

Michelle said, ‘It’s a wheel divided into flavour segments. Just a graphic representation of tastes and smells. It was the department of enology at UC Davis that first came up with the concept. My dad published his own version of it in a book he wrote about wine tasting.’

Sophie clicked the mouse and waited a moment. ‘And he put it right up here on his website.’

Enzo eased himself out of the rocker and rounded the table to have a look. The wheel was divided into multicoloured segments. An inner wheel was separated into the ten perceived categories of taste and smell, the largest of which was
Fruit
. It then ranged through
Sweet, Wood, Spice, Savoury, Herbal, Floral, Nutty, Mineral,
and
Dairy
, which was the smallest. Each category was allotted a different colour, subdivided through the outer wheel into individual flavours represented by tonal variations of that colour.
Fruit
was split into red and green and went from apple, pear, and lemon, through to prune, fig, and jam.
Spice
was pink and included tobacco, smoke, and liquorice; while
Dairy
, which was yellow, comprised only butter and cream. In all, there were sixty-four flavours.

Enzo shook his head and marvelled at the smells and flavours people were able to discern in wine. Ground coffee. Leather. Cut grass. Toast. Stones. And yet, they were all things he had perceived himself in one wine or another over the years. Violets, cherries, grilled nuts. Some were appealing, others less so. Earth, green pepper, petrol. He screwed up his face at the very thought.

Bertrand said, ‘Look, he also lists the words he used to describe the sensual qualities of wine in the mouth.’ He pointed to an alphabetical list of seventeen words below the wheel. They went from
Astringent
, describing mouth-puckering tannins, through
Firm, Heavy
and
Sharp
, to
Thin
, representing a lack of flavour and body.

‘Okay,’ Enzo said, ‘print all that out for me.’ He felt a
frisson
of excitement. Things were starting to fall into place. ‘This gives us pretty much his full flavour vocabulary, describing what he smelled in a wine, tasted in a wine, and how it felt in his mouth. These are almost certainly what he created the codes for.’

‘As well as his ratings,’ Sophie said.

Bertrand nodded. ‘A through to F and 1 through to 5.’

‘Which means…’ Enzo did a quick mental calculation. ‘…we’re looking for a total of ninety-two codes.’ He lifted the pages from the printer as it fed them out through the inkjet and crossed to the whiteboard. He wiped off Petty’s coded rating for the Sarrabelle Syrah and started listing the flavours in columns, beginning with
Fruit
. Then he moved on to the one-word sensual descriptions, and finally the ratings. It took him nearly ten minutes, and the others watched in silence as his marker pen squeaked its way across the shiny white surface. ‘Okay.’ Enzo stood back and looked at the lists before picking up the notes they had made at old Domenech’s house the night before.

He scrutinised his scribbles, frowning in concentration. His writing had become less and less legible as the night wore on.

‘There,’ he said at last. ‘The 2001 Petrus Pommerol that we had. Domenech agreed with Petty’s published description of a wine with strong hints of liquorice and vanilla.’ He ran a finger down through his notes, stopping and tapping near the foot of the page. ‘Now, when he tasted the three Gaillac reds that we only have the coded notes for, he discerned vanilla and liquorice in the Sarrabelle Syrah, and vanilla in the Cuvée Léa.’ He held out a hand towards Bertrand. ‘Give me the printouts.’

Bertrand handed him the coded reviews of the three wines they had taken to Cordes en Ciel, and Enzo pinned them to the wall beside the board. He stood scanning them studiously before exasperation exploded in a breath from pursed lips. ‘Trouble is, there are too many repeating codes. There are codes unique to each one, but there are several. We have no way of knowing which one might be
liquorice
. And of the ones that repeat, which one might be
vanilla
.’ He slumped into the rocker and let his notes fall into his lap. ‘Shit! The sample’s too small. We’d need to go on tasting wines until we found a unique flavour to match a unique code, or multiple codes that repeated so often that we could be sure of the match.’

Sophie cocked an eyebrow and grinned. ‘Well, I’m all for tasting more wines.’

But Enzo was adamant. ‘No. It’s not the way.’ He glanced semi-apologetically at Bertrand. ‘It was a good idea, but it’s not how we’re going to break the code.’

‘Well how are we going to break it?’ Sophie cocked her head at her father.

‘
We
are not going to do anything.
You
are going to leave me in peace to think about it.’ He cast a rueful look at Michelle. ‘All of you.’

Sophie stood up. ‘Well, there’s no point in arguing with him. When my Papa makes up his mind about something, that’s it.’ She took Bertrand’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s go to town and find a café.’ She flounced out with Bertrand in tow. Enzo saw that the rain was still falling from the heavens.

He sighed and turned to Michelle. ‘You can stay if you want.’

But Michelle shook her head. ‘No. You need to think. I understand that.’

‘I’m sorry about Sophie.’

‘I understand that, too. Maybe if I was her, I’d feel the same way.’ She got up from the stairs and crossed the room to plant a gentle kiss on Enzo’s forehead. He smelled her perfume and felt her warmth, and for a moment was tempted to forget about codes and killers and take her through to the bedroom. But the thought that someone else might be about to go missing, that someone else was in danger of suffering the same fate as Petty and Coste, and probably the others in Roussel’s file, weighed on his conscience, and he knew that Michelle would have to wait. He gave her hand a squeeze, and felt a rush of regret as she went out onto the
terrasse
to recover her umbrella and brave the rain.

He got up and crossed to the wine rack and took out a bottle of Château Lacroux 2001 Vignes de Castellan. He uncorked it and poured himself an inch of it before swirling the deep, rich red around inside the glass. The wine was at perfect room temperature and gave off the distinctive Gaillac aromas of the duras and braucol grapes. Which made him think of the puppy for the first time in hours, and he looked in vain around the room before spotting him curled up fast asleep under the table. Enzo smiled. Daughters and dogs, he thought. Endless trouble. But always worth it. He took a mouthful of wine. Red fruits, a hint of black cherry, liquorice.

He carried the bottle over to the rocking chair, sat down, and filled his glass. As he sipped at the wine, he gazed at all the flavours he had written up on the board, until they blurred and swam in front of his eyes. He refilled his glass and turned his attention to the coded reviews:

The letters were always in groups of two or three. Some of them made words, like
la
and
ma
. Others made no sense at all.
jmo
or
hh
.

He drank some more wine and closed his eyes. But the codes were still there, etched by light on his retinas. There had to be a simple logic to it. He thought back to his own allusion to the French-English dictionary. Two lists of corresponding words, one of which was in alphabetical order. And something began to chip away at his consciousness from somewhere below the surface. Something nagging, insistent, like a woodpecker drilling holes in trees. His head hurt at the thought, and he wondered irrationally, if woodpeckers ever got headaches. He felt his glass slip in his hand, and he put it down on the floor before he dropped it. There was something there. Something just beyond reach. Something that someone had said. Something right in front of his eyes. A key to unlocking the code. But he was so, so very sleepy.

***

He was a long way down. It was very dark here, and strange creatures floated through the murk, skulking in the shadows, bulbous eyes staring at him through fronds that waved about in the eddies and currents of cold, cold water. There was a tug on his line, and he realised that there was very little oxygen left. He could hear a voice, from somewhere very far above, calling him back to the surface. He had found something down here, and he wanted to tell them. But he knew he mustn’t make his ascent too quickly, or he would lose it.

He pushed off towards the voice, mud and sand rising all around him. He tipped his head back and saw the light and heard the voice again, and found himself rising at an alarming rate. Too fast. He broke the surface gasping for breath.

‘Papa!’ Sophie glared at him. ‘You’ve been drinking.’

Enzo frowned. ‘Only a couple of glasses.’

The door opened from the
terrasse
, and Michelle came in. Sophie turned to look at her. ‘Where were you?’

‘I waited in the car until I saw you coming back.’

‘Well, the great mind here, who wanted us to leave him alone so that he could concentrate, drank some wine and fell asleep. That’s what old men do, you know. Fall asleep in chairs.’ She flashed Michelle a very purposeful look, just in case she’d missed the point.

‘What time is it?’ Enzo ignored his daughter’s barb.

Bertrand looked at his watch. ‘Nearly six. You’ve been out for a couple of hours, Monsieur Macleod.’

Enzo stood up stiffly and focused on the whiteboard; then he ripped one of the coded reviews from the wall and blinked at it, trying to remember. And then he did. He turned to find three faces looking at him expectantly, and he smiled and waved the piece of paper in the air. ‘It’s quite simple, really.’

‘What is?’ Sophie took the review from him and looked at it.

‘The code.’

‘You broke it? In your sleep?’

‘Maybe I was asleep, maybe I wasn’t.’ He turned towards the whiteboard and lifted his marker pen. The others watched, filled with sudden curiosity, as he wrote up
l, b
and
j
, then turned back to them. A smile split his face. ‘What do these letters mean to anyone.’ They all looked blankly at the board. ‘Okay. Let’s capitalise them. It makes a big difference.’ He wrote up
LBJ
. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see it.’ Still nothing. ‘Okay, maybe you were too young. But in the sixties, during the Vietnam war, these were initials on everybody’s lips.’ He said them out loud. ‘LBJ.’